When we were planning this trip to the UK, one of the places that Zach was interested in visiting was the island of Islay (pronounced “eye – la”) off the west coast of Scotland, where (arguably) the best whisky in Scotland is produced. Zach first got interested in whisky back when he was working at …
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March 2025 in Portugal and Southern Spain
Time for a change in the blog… In 2010, we went on a 6-week bicycling adventure in central Europe. Internet access along our route was very spotty (we didn’t even have access every day), our phones didn’t work in Europe, and good photos required using a stand-alone digital camera instead of a phone. So we …
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Planes, trains, buses, boats, and automobiles: Alaska 2024
In June, after we returned from our trip to Hawaii, we talked to Zach’s mother (Virginia), and decided that we all wanted to take a trip to Alaska, if it wasn’t too late to organize it for this summer. For both Zach and Jennifer, Alaska was the only state we hadn’t visited yet, so completing …
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Southwest Trip 2024
In March of 2024, Jennifer traded in her all-electric 2022 Kia Niro for a slightly-used plug-in hybrid 2023 Kia Niro. She liked driving the 2022 Niro, and liked not using gasoline to drive around town, but decided she wanted a car that was easier to deal with when leaving town. The new Niro still has …
Miscellaneous Adventures 2022
The last few years, around the end of the year we have been making posts with some notes and photos from adventures that we didn’t write up as individual blog posts. We’re a bit late this year, but I (Jennifer) decided late was better than never, so here goes! Early in 2022, Zach decided he …
Southwest Road Trip
In late November 2022, we embarked on a three-week road trip to the Southwest, which I’m finally getting around to writing up a blog post about (this post is written by Jennifer). We took my electric car… the electric vehicle charging infrastructure in the US right now is having some problems (a lot of charging …
Cycling and Ferry Hopping in the Gulf Islands
In late summer 2022, we decided that it had been too long since we had taken a bike trip, and we started discussing where to go for a fall trip. We didn’t really want to fly anywhere, due to concerns about COVID-19 as well as the hassles of transporting bicycles on airplanes. We discussed going …
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2022 Kia Niro EV — Road Trip Notes
As noted in our previous post, I (Jennifer) recently bought a fully electric car, a 2022 Kia Niro EV. During the month of November, we took a road trip from our home in the Spokane, Washington area to southern California (and back) in my new car. Here are some notes from the trip. Warning: some …
Miscellaneous Adventures 2021
We’ve had a pretty busy 2021 so far, especially the last couple of months, filled with home improvements, new cars, outdoor activities, and trips — so it seemed like time for another Adventures blog post! In January, Zach purchased a Toyota RAV4 Prime (plug-in hybrid). Since this car was not being sold in Washington state, …
Road Trip in the Time of COVID-19
Since March, we’ve been following a pretty strict physical distancing protocol. We’ve kept up our hiking and cycling activities locally, but we have only been seeing people either outside while maintaining our distance or online (aside from masked-up essential trips to get groceries, doctors, etc.). It has kept us healthy so far, but we have …
Cycling the Oregon Coast
We had a busy summer this year, but hadn’t been on a bike tour in a while, so we decided to go out and ride part of the Oregon coast. We started our trip to Oregon by putting our bikes on Jennifer’s car and driving to Portland the day after the Labor Day holiday, where …
Summer 2017 Photos
We had a very busy summer this year — we didn’t go on any big trips, but we had quite a few small adventures. And we didn’t get around to blogging or posting any photos until now… Better late than never, I hope? Zach spent most of June on a road trip, which Jennifer didn’t …
Spring 2017 trips are for the birds (and other animals)
We recently returned from the second of two spring trips. In April, we visited friends and relatives in Florida and Georgia, and in May, we visited friends in Costa Rica. It was great to see all the friends and relatives that we don’t see all that often (plus Zach’s new nephew Bo!). And we also …
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Summer 2016
We had a pretty busy summer. Nothing really seemed to qualify for its own “adventures” post, but we had a lot of fun and went to some beautiful places, so I thought I would post a photo gallery of some of our summer activities, which included: June – Adventure Cycling’s National Bicycle Travel Weekend – …
Hawaii, the Big Island
In November, we took a 3-week trip to Hawaii, where we spent 2 weeks on the Big Island of Hawaii (Zach’s mom Virginia joined us for the middle week of that), and 5 days on Oahu visiting with family (Zach’s sister Valinda and her family are there, as well as Jennifer’s cousin Luke and his …
Minnesota cycling part 3: Driving back
After finishing our bike ride across Minnesota in Fargo, North Dakota (see previous post), we packed everything back up in the car and set out to drive home on Wednesday the 23rd. We drove most of the way across North Dakota, and camped south of Medora in Sully Creek State Park, which had a very …
Minnesota cycling part 1: Driving there
Zach and Jennifer are both (not too seriously) trying to visit all 50 United States; they’re each down to less than 10 to go. A while back, we compared our lists and found that neither of us had ever been to Wisconsin, Minnesota, or North Dakota. Minnesota seemed like a nice place for bicycle riding, …